SharePoint: a lover not a hater

I confess that my 15 years with SharePoint have been something of a love-hate relationship.

But now, fresh from July’s Microsoft World Partner Conference in Toronto, I am pleased to share that my love and enthusiasm for SharePoint is reinvigorated. I now see an exciting future for SharePoint and me.

The future of SharePoint: accessible, intelligent, personal

Let’s go back a bit to May’s “The Future of SharePoint” event in San Francisco, where Microsoft unveiled its cloud-first, mobile-first vision and SharePoint roadmap.

The premise behind it is this: in a cloud-first, mobile-first world, employees work on corporate applications and access data from on-premises and cloud-based systems from anywhere using every type of device from laptops to BYO devices.

To put SharePoint at the heart of this vision, Microsoft plans to make SharePoint more accessible, more intelligent and more personalised, to achieve this they have four areas of innovation:

Simple and powerful file-sharing and collaboration on any device

The mobile and intelligent intranet, with modern team sites, publishing and business applications on your desktop and in your pocket

An open and connected platform that evolves SharePoint extensibility to embrace modern web development

Investments in security, privacy and compliance across Office 365

Bright new SharePoint features for 2016

So what can we expect?

Over the last quarter and for the remainder of 2016, Microsoft will be making changes to both the on premises and online versions of the product.

These will include:

Modern document library experience (currently rolling out to first release tenants), combining the power of SharePoint with OneDrive usability

A new SharePoint mobile app for iOS (now available for download from iTunes store) – see it in action here

A new SharePoint home in Office 365 gives you unified access, search capabilities and activity metrics for all of your sites – online and on-premises

Modern lists experience, improvements to bulk editing and ease of use, automate processes with versions, approvals and alerts and enriched static information with people, images and metadata tags

Site activity and insights on the site contents page to help site owners, members and visitors understand the activities occurring within the site